To check hyperinflation, Argentina pegged the peso at one US dollar in 1991. This stopped inflation in its tracks: but, with the rise of the dollar against the Euro and the substantial devaluation of the Brazilian real, the peso became increasingly over-valued leading to a significant...

Producing high technology output and supplying sophisticated services often involves costly investment in industry-specific skills. But the threat of poaching means that it is the individual ‘stakeholder’, not the firm, who must bear the cost. We investigate various mechanisms for funding...

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a supermajority of creditors...

Alan Walters has suggested that the European Monetary System will prove dynamically unstable when capital controls are removed. The argument is analysed within a model that includes overlapping contracts. It is found that the short-run effects predicted by Walters only arise when the credibility...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a ‘worker-discipline device’. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated....

This paper proposes an integrated framework to analyze jointly two key issues: the emergence of global imbalances and the precautionary motive for accumulating reserves. Standard models of general equilibrium would predict modest current account surpluses in the emerging markets if they face...

Este trabajo propone un marco integrado para analizar conjuntamente dos aspectos claves: el surgimiento de desequilibrios mundiales y la motivación preventiva de la acumulación de reservas. Los modelos estándar de equilibrio general pueden anticipar superávits reducidos de la cuenta...

Is sovereign borrowing so different from corporate debt that there is no need for bankruptcy- style procedures to protect debtors? With the waiver of immunity, sovereign debtors who already face severe disruption from short-term creditors grabbing their currency reserves are also exposed to...